Help Please-Older Sata drive how to remove/re-use partitions

artinusa said:

I have recently installed a new Sata hard disk . as the old one was 'smart' assessed 'ready to go 'and did..lol Can anyone help me please -How do I remove-increase or delete the partitions on the old drive (eblow)..so that I can use whats left of the old one to use as storage. There is on the old disk a healthy system partition of 100GB -----a healthy Factory Image of 12 GB and 454 GB healthy primary Partition. I use the word healthy from the disk manager description. If I boot up the system the old one wants to boot and messes up the computer. Can I alter the boot sequence in the BIOS and will this stop the bad disk from trying to boot. (reallocation of Sectors Problem) TIA

As was requested, can you please post a COMPLETE screenshot from DISKMGMT.MSC, so that we can see exactly what is on your new and old drives.

Yes, you MUST have your new drive set to be first in the boot sequence shown in the BIOS, if that's where your newly installed Windows has been placed. It looks like you have a "system reserved" of 100MB and a second similar partition (drive letter K, so it must be the "system reserved" on whatever is the other drive from wherever you are currently booted ), so I'm guessing we're looking at the results from two separate drives... but without a picture of the drives from DISKMGMT it's hard to comment further.

But FOR SURE... when you're finished with your upgrade to the new drive you want to show as ACTIVE the 100MB "system reserved" partition which is on the new drive. And that new drive should also be shown as first in the BIOS boot sequence of hard drives. The old "system reserved" partition (which was previously also marked ACTIVE when it was your one and only drive) should be changed to be marked NOT ACTIVE, but it isn't critical since it will be the second hard drive in the BIOS boot sequence and thus is irrelevant. And anyway that old 100MB "system reserved" partition is going to be disappeared when you delete everything on that old drive and re-partition as you now want for use as a second "data drive".

Easiest way for your to solve all of your problems is to install Free Minitool Partition Wizard (which runs under Windows) along with its standalone boot CD which you can download the ISO for and burn to CD yourself (so that you can boot to it directly and manipulate your C-partition where Windows lives and do other things which cannot be performed while running under Windows).

When you boot to the Partition Wizard bootable CD you can do everything you now want to do (other than changing the BIOS boot sequence, which you'll of course need to do yourself, to point to the new drive as boot drive #1). You can mark the "system reserved" partition on your new drive as "active". You can also DELETE ALL PARTITIONS ON THE OLD DRIVE, which naturally will have the effect of un-marking that old "system reserved" partition as not active... since it will be completely deleted.

Then you can also create any brand new partitions (for data) on your old drive that you care to create, which will be your second hard drive per your new adjusted BIOS settings.

You can also resize the partitions on your new drive, if say you'd like to shrink C and add a second data partition on that drive as well. All of this can be done using Partition Wizard, from the bootable CD. And the same functions can be done using the program while running under Windows as long as you're not affecting the C-partition with your maintenance. Note that if you do want to make changes to C while running Partition Wizard under Windows, it will ask you to re-boot in order to complete the application of these changes and will kick in at boot time to perform what is needed before proceeding on to finish the rest of the normal Windows desktop startup.

Similar results can be obtained using DISKMGMT.MSC itself, but you you must be running under Windows and certain operations will not be allowed. If you run using Partition Wizard's standalone boot CD you can do ANYTHING you want, with 100% reliability.

Thank you both..sorry for delay i was away..just about to try your help ideas ..will comment on success or other..